The Hellfire Club

fondling the pistol he had taken from Officer LeDonne. 'How did you get this car?'

'Nora magic. If not for this evidence of your ability to smooth my passage, I might have treated your moment of rebellion a good deal more harshly. But here you are, and instantly, here's the Duesie. Kismet. Though I did have my eye on your friend's MG. Is he an ex-cop?'

'He's an ex-lots of things.' She glanced again at his twist of a smirk, unwilling to let him see her dismay. 'Including a cop. He was the housekeeper at the Poplars.'

'Devoted manservant,' Dart said. 'Deeply attached to the young lord's beloved. A romantic dalliance, perhaps?'

'No.'

He raised his eyebrows and grinned. A stream of pedestrians moved staring past the from of the car.

'Last night, I asked some questions of the local citizens. An MG fancier who had observed the two of you pointed me toward the hotel, and there I came upon the vehicle in question. I thought I'd collect your friend when he came back for you this morning, but you came out and had your encounter with the previous owners of the Duesie. The old black magic has them in its spell, I says to myself, I says. Give me a little peek into the workshop, Nora-pie, tell me what you said to them.'

'I said I hoped his wife would kill him in bed one night.'

Dart barked out his ugly laugh and patted his fingertips against the barrel of the gun in applause. 'Struck a nerve, magic one, struck a nerve. By the time they got to the corner, the old waffle was screeching at him. When you ducked into the front of the theater, I hustled across the street and followed them, acting on faith, always the proper thing to do, and before they went ten feet, Douglas Fairbanks pulled over to chastise her. The waffle got out and walked away. Doug took after her, so angry he forgot his keys. He trotted along, screaming at her, collapsed, bang -the old boy's flat out on the sidewalk. Another victim of an unwise marriage. I got in the Duesie and drove it right past the commotion, and do you know what? I think the waffle saw me. Bet she experienced one of the great moments of her life. When Douglas Fairbanks wakes up in the hospital, he'll take one look at the monitors at his bedside, the tubes coming from his every orifice, and he'll say - What happened to my car? And the waffle will say, Dear, I was too worried about you to think about the Duesie. This is the most important thing in his life, but can he criticize: her for letting it get stolen? He wants to tear her heart out and fry it over an open fire, but instead he has to be grateful to her!'

Dart smiled to himself. 'Sometimes I doubt myself. Sometimes I stop and wonder if I'm wrong and everybody else is right. And then something like this happens, and I know I can relax. Men are just dogs, but women are lions.'

He reached over what seemed a much greater distance than would have been the case in any other car and patted her knee.

'You, Nora, are still a baby lion, but you're a great baby lion, and you've grown by leaps and bounds. When we started on our odyssey, you didn't know enough to last five minutes. But after twenty- four hours at the feet of the great Dick Dart, you're able to figure out a way to see Dr Foil and Everett Tidy.'

Nora pulled up at the stop sign before the Smith campus at State Street, and the usual backpacks and blue jeans gave the car the usual appreciative stares.

'Thought we'd get out of Massachusetts for a couple of nights, find a nice motel somewhere up in Maine. Safest place in America. Half of Maine hasn't even heard of television yet. They're still waiting to see if that moon- landing thing worked out.' He opened the glove compartment. 'Must be some maps here. Assholes with medals on their cars always have a million maps. Right again, Dick, we knew we could count on you.'

Smith College rolled past the side of Dart's head. Nora glanced up Green Street and saw Jeffrey sprinting across the sidewalk to his car. 'Would you consider another possibility?'

He tilted his face toward her as he sorted through the maps. 'Maine sound a little primitive? I have a better idea. Canada. Don't need passports, they just wave you in and out. Our charming cousins to the north. Most self- effacing people on earth. You know what a Canadian says when you're about to kill him? 'May I floss first?''

'I have a reservation in one of the cottages at Shorelands.'

'Shorelands?' He fell back against the leather seal. 'Idea has a decided sparkle. Continuation of our original quest. I trust this reservation is in some suitably neutral name.'

'Mrs Norma Desmond.'

'Lovely. I can be Norman Desmond. My character takes shape about me even as we speak. Norm, husband of Norm. Lawyer by day, devotee of the written word by night. All my talks with my old dears very useful. Every now and then I could reel off some verse to impress the shit out of the guardians of culture. Wouldn't have to be Emily, I can quote lots of other idiots, too. Keats, Shelley, Gray - all the greats.'

'Can you?'

'I told you, as soon as I read something, it's in there for good. Let me win a couple of bets in bars, but after a while, I couldn't get anybody to wager that I wasn't able to recite all of 'To a Sky-Lark.' Want to hear it?'

'Not really.'

'Good. It's terrible. Now, were you going there by yourself?'

'Jeffrey was going to drive me there and drop me off.'

He nodded. 'Pull over to the side, so I can look at one of these maps and figure out how to get there.'

She coasted to a stop. Dart removed a folded map from the pile. 'Okay, here's Lenox and here's us. No problem. We go back into town, take 9 all the way to Pittsfield, and go south on 7. On the way, you can tell me what you got out of Mark Foil and Everett Tidy. But before that, do explain why you decided to go to this broken- down literary colony. Documents hidden under the floorboards? Katherine Mannheim's draft of Night Journey salted away in the bole of a tree?'

'I want to see where they all met each other.'

'And?'

'Get a better idea of the layout.'

'Piece together their comings and goings, that sort of thing? What else?'

She remembered the boys arranging the terrace in the lemon light of the morning; she remembered Helen Day. 'I thought I might be able to talk to some of the maids.'

'You mystify me.'

'Some of the old staff is still around. The other night I realized that servants know everything. Like those boys you told me about, the ones who work at the Yacht Club.'

'Deeply flattered, but the hag who changed Hugo Driver's sheets fifty-five years ago isn't likely to know what he wrote or didn't write, even if she's still alive.'

'Katherine Mannheim didn't write Night Journey. That isn't the issue anymore.'

He took it in. 'Then why didn't Alden Chancel tell the old ladies to cram their lawsuit up the old rectal valve? He could have told their lawyer to go to hell at the beginning, but he put Dart, Morris on the case. If he's in the clear, why fork out money to his law firm?'

Nora remembered how she had felt when she had seen Davey on the hotel terrace with his new pals, Mr Hashim and Mr Shull. Dart was going to love what she was about to tell him. 'Alden doesn't want anybody to question Driver's authorship of his books. That's a sensitive point.'

He became instantly attentive. 'Do tell. I mean, do. Tell.'

'The horror novels weren't the first books Daisy wrote for Alden under a phony name. The other name she used was Hugo Driver.'

Dart blinked, then laughed. That boozy old pillowcase wrote Night Journey?' For a second he was the nice-looking man he would have been if he were not Dick Dart, and he laughed again. 'No wonder Alden got rid of the manuscript! No, it can't be. She's too young. You're riding the wrong horse, babycakes.'

'She didn't write the good one,' Nora said. 'She wrote the other two.'

Dart opened his mouth as if to make a point. Then he regarded her in pure appreciative amazement. 'Bravo. They came out in the sixties. How'd you find out?'

'You'd never see it unless you compared the Driver books with her horror novels, but once you do it's obvious. Daisy has certain trademark expressions she uses over and over. There was never any reason for anyone to read her horror books side by side with the last two Drivers, so no one ever noticed.'